Adding Functionality to the SharePoint UI

SharePoint does a lot of really cool things for you out of the box, and jQuery allows you to extend some of its offerings to enhance the user experience. By adding jQuery to a SharePoint page, you can change the behavior of elements that are typically out of your control. Here, we'll explore how to allow users to expand and collapse items in the Quick Launch menu, display graphs from SharePoint list data, use jQuery from the Ribbon, and filter the Quick Launch menu.

Expanding and Collapsing from Quick Launch

The first example we will look at is how to allow end users to collapse and expand items from the Quick Launch menu. As shown in Figure 8-1, with the Quick Launch menu expanded, you can see the categories of the items, such as Libraries, Lists, and Discussions, as well as the items from each of the categories, such as Site Pages, News, and Team Discussion.